


crazy how life goes on without me

by pierianabeyance



Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: just a nice lil chat on the beach because its all i can think about rn, the rest of the ipre is mentioned but thats about it
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-13
Updated: 2017-05-13
Packaged: 2018-10-31 11:36:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,120
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10898544
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pierianabeyance/pseuds/pierianabeyance
Summary: Barry feels he’s bared too much of his soul for one night, and is just about to shake his head and let the topic drop, but before he can do that the thought just comes tumbling out. “It’s been twenty-one fucking years, Taako.”“And?”“And, that’s…Just a really long time.”After another moment, much to his surprise, he gets a response. “Yeah, I guess it is.”--An extended conversation between Taako and Barry during ep62, mostly because these are just some thoughts I haven't been able to get out of my head about their whole situation.





	crazy how life goes on without me

**Author's Note:**

> look i know this isnt more tazswap or the stolen century fic ive been TRYING to write for weeks and i Know that barry saying "its only been twenty one years" was kind of a joke line but...i mean holy shit, it made me Think and i have not been able 2 stop thinking abt it  
> this really isnt great bc i am Terribly Ill and like dying of a headache and just sorta banged this out in an hour but eeehhhh i at least had to put some of these Thoughts out there. proper characterization? proofreading? you know the drill. i dont know them. also i dont ... fuckin remember how old barry is?? i just kind of put him in his nonspecific mid to late twenties and hoped for the best  
> i need an advil and a nap. hope yall enjoy.

_ “We’ve lost a lot. And there’s a lot more we might lose, but...the one thing we do have is the thing that people in love rarely ever have enough of. Time.” _

_ “Well I don’t know - I don’t know about in love, it’s only been tw - um, tw-twenty one years…” _

_ “Sure.” _

_ “...Shit.” _

It isn’t like that’s something that’s never crossed Barry’s mind before, or anyone’s for that matter, but still it was strange to say out loud.  _ Twenty-one years _ . Twenty-one years gone by and he’s got nothing to show for it, and not just in regards to his pitiful crush on Lup - in regards to  _ everything _ . To any kind of physical change, to a better understanding of how to stop the Hunger, to a better understanding of the people he’s  _ with _ . He looks up at Taako, whose gaze has already drifted back across the water and who seems entirely unbothered by the realization Barry has just made. 

“Barry,” he says, “You’ve got all the time in the world, my man.”

Twenty-one years and who knows how many more? He’s what, now, well into his forties? His fifties? Almost double what he started off as. And with no change to show for it. It’s not hard to remember what he looks like, it’s the same reflection he’s seen for two decades, but it hits him with a start that he has no idea what he  _ should  _ look like. Like his father, he figures, but then - what did his father look like? He’s not sure the image is as clear in his mind now as perhaps it would have been twenty years prior.

Taako sits himself down on a towel laid out on the sand but he keeps his eyes on the water, and Barry follows him down automatically, pulling his knees up to his chest and wrapping his arms around them like he’s a child again. 

“ _ Shit, _ ” he says again, and Taako looks over at him.

For just a moment, a strangely hesitant look flickers over Taako’s face, something that looks almost like concern. These sort of conversations aren’t really his forte; Barry doesn’t need to know him any better to pick up that much, and he thinks just speaking of a thing like love as briefly as he had might have been all the emotional energy in him. But he collects himself soon enough and much to Barry’s surprise, takes the plunge. “Somethin’ wrong?”

Barry, too, feels he’s bared too much of his soul for one night, and is just about to shake his head and let the topic drop, but before he can do that the thought just comes tumbling out. “It’s been twenty-one fucking years, Taako.”

“And?”

“And, that’s…” looking at Taako again, Barry realizes that maybe emotions aside, this really just isn’t the best conversation to have with Taako. Nor would it be to have with Lup, or even to a lesser extent Merle or Davenport, because what’s twenty-one years to them? For Taako and Lup at least, he can only imagine it must be nothing at all. Twenty-one years to the pair who couldn’t have been less than a century old already when everything started, twenty-one years to the pair who had so much more than that left even if they weren’t caught in this mess of cycles. This time, Barry does shake his head, muttering something along the lines of “Just a really long time,” and letting his words trail off into nothing by the end.

After another moment, much to his surprise, he gets a response. “Yeah, I guess it is.” Barry looks at Taako, and Taako looks back, and with that look he seems to sense most of what Barry has already concluded about the difference between their perceptions of exactly how long that time is. Sighing, he rolls his eyes. “I mean, granted, more for you than for me. But...I mean, twenty-one years. I think that’s a pretty long time no matter who you are.”

“Mmm.” Now  _ that’s _ something Barry can agree with. “Makes everything seem so much faster, doesn’t it?”

“Faster,” Taako repeats, less of a question and more of just an echo, a prompt for him to keep going.

“When you realize you’ve got all the time in the world, you just sorta...lose track of it. And so much more goes by than you think. And you just - well, not  _ you _ , but  _ I _ \- I haven’t  _ aged _ , Taako, not the way I should. I’ve just looked the same for twenty  _ years _ , and I know that for however much longer we do this I’ll just keep looking like that. I mean,  _ fuck _ . I’m not far off from surpassing the life expectancy of an average human, and just  _ thinking _ about that - thinking about that, about all of this, it just fucks with your perception, you know? Or...no, maybe you don’t. You probably don’t.  _ Shit _ .” He brings his rambling to a stop, biting his tongue and pushing the palms of his hands into the sand behind him.

“Maybe,” Taako echoes him again, noncommittal. “I’m guessing my perception might have been a little different than yours from the start anyways. But like I said - twenty-one years is twenty-one years, homie. It’s still a pretty long time. You just might need to give me another century or two to jump on with your aging issue. Not that it’ll be much of an issue for me - I mean, potentially eternal youth? Sign me the fuck up.” 

Barry doesn’t really know what to say to that, and Taako doesn’t for a while either.

The sounds of the ocean fill the silence that stretches between them then, and the wind carries over very quiet laughter from somewhere in the distance. Taako traces the pattern on the surfboard next to him with his fingers and tries to make his voice sound light, the same joking tone that he’s upheld for the majority of the past twenty years. “And this is pretty great anyways, right? I mean, jumping through the planar system, seeing shit that nobody from our world could even imagine, being able to learn about it - I can only imagine the pure unadulterated  _ joy _ that brings your nerd brain to think about, just a little bit. Twenty-one years ago when you first put on that stuffy red robe, where else did you think you were going to be by now? Couldn’t have been better than this.”

“Home,” Barry says without thinking, and it sounds so completely  _ childish _ that he can’t even believe he really just said it, but it’s true. “I thought I’d be...back home, and...I don’t know. Something  _ special _ . The world renowned scientist who went on the Institute’s first ever planar exploration mission and took part in discovering a new form of energy to bring back and power half the planet with, or who brought back the next revolutionary invention that changed the goddamn  _ world _ . And by now I’d be home looking after my mom and buying her everything she’s ever wanted, and maybe...maybe I’d have a family or something, a wife and some kids.”

Taako looks taken aback by the sheer amount of honesty in the response. “Shit, dude,” seems to be all he can say.

“What about you?” Barry asks. “Where did you think you would end up?”

As he probably should have expected, Taako stiffens, and he seems to be readying some kind of sarcastic comment or joke or maybe even a  _ none of  _ your _ business, Barold _ , before promptly dusting the sand off himself and returning to the water, but he doesn’t. Instead he pauses, and then he relaxes, shrugging. “Couldn’t tell ya, my man. I don’t think Lup had much of an idea about any of that, and she was sorta the whole reason we did this. Free ticket out of this bullshit world, all we gotta do is get picked and go. What could go wrong?” He shakes his head. “You know Lup. She did have some big idea, because she always does. Get back and we’ll be rich, get back and we’ll be famous, get back and we’ll be  _ renowned _ too. We can make a living out of that. Or maybe she was just thinking, fuck it, why not? In any case, I didn’t say no, so. There’s that.”

Barry hesitates, further prompting on the tip of his tongue but afraid that if he pushes too far he might lose the genuineness he’s getting already. “But what did you think?”

Pause. Barry worries that he has pushed too far, that he shouldn’t have asked, but then - “You know what I always wanted to do?” Taako doesn’t wait for a response, smiling faintly to himself and going right on. “Have a fuckin’...cooking show. A traveling show or something, our own damn caravan, doing what we do on our own terms, not because we need a place to sleep. Maybe we’d be famous, or whatever, but if not then that’s whatever too. As long as things were good. Lup and Taako, world famous-or-also-possibly-not-famous chefs.”

Barry smiles too, much wider. “I think that suits you pretty well.”

“‘Preciate it. I think your thing suits you pretty well too.”

“Thanks.”

More laughter carries over from behind them, and they can both only imagine what it must be for. Maybe Magnus jumped out at Davenport again and they’re all getting a laugh out of that, or maybe Magnus tried to surprise Lup and wound up with an early black eye. Either way, it sounds like they’re having fun, and the ocean agrees, waves lapping gently against the sand in harmony with the sound. Barry thinks maybe they should head back and see what’s so funny, but Taako seems content to stay right where he is and watch the waves and Barry finds that he feels the same.

“Twenty-one fuckin’ years,” he mutters after some time, more to himself than to Taako, but elven ears can’t be evaded so easily and he hears anyways.

“Twenty-one years,” he says simply, nodding. And then he smirks, nudging Barry’s arm with his own. “And you’ve been hopelessly pining after my sister for every single one of them.”

Barry groans, but it becomes more of a laugh towards the end. “Jeez, I wouldn’t call it  _ hopeless _ .”

“I would.”

“Alright, that’s probably fair.”

This time when the silence finds them, it decides to stay, comfortable where it is for once. And when the sun is just barely peeking over the horizon, on its way down for the night, Taako silently picks up his board and heads back out towards the water without a word. And after a moment, Barry follows, but he doesn’t follow Taako out to wherever he’s drifting, instead he stands in the knee-deep water and looks down into it.

The water is clear as it always is, almost unnaturally so. Sometimes he tries to get the thought in his head that this is home as he remembers it, but the water always breaks the illusion, too clear to be any ocean back home that he can recall visiting. But then - he was never much of a swimmer anyways, so who is he to really say?

In any case, he looks down at the water and even without his glasses on he can just barely see his reflection on the surface, the light of the coming moon just enough to offer him that much visibility. And he sees the same face that he’s seen for twenty-one years, the same eyes that had seen the Institute’s red uniforms so hopefully and bright. Twenty-one years the same, and a number he cannot even begin to guess left for him.

He doesn’t think he’s ever really going to get used to this, but maybe he doesn’t have to. Not yet, at least. He has all the time in the world to put off unpacking this further, all the time in the world and the same can’t be said for the world that he’s in. His time here is finite, the clock ticking down faster and faster every second, and maybe in twenty-one more years there won’t be any place to swim. He looks out at Taako, drifting lazily across the water far in the distance, and he thinks about Lup and how boldly and how brilliantly she lives every moment that she has, even though there’s no way of telling how few or how many moments are left. And then he looks back down at the water and wades a little further in until he’s far enough to dive underneath and let it surround him, because all the time he’s already lived, all twenty-one years plus before, and he’s never realized just how much he  loves it.

**Author's Note:**

> mayhaps talk to me abt taz on [tumbler dot com](http://celebitxt.tumblr.com) bc god knows my gay ass is dying abt it every day


End file.
